“Orland the Everbright,” Dain said theatrically, spreading his arms apart. “Strongest man alive, Dragonslayer of the North, the Kingsbane of the Seven Citadels, the Coin-Counting Saint, the Sword That Weighs Deeds, the—”

  “Yes. I know who Orland is—”

  “—the Equal to the Gods,” he bulldozed on, lifting a slime-clotted finger as if ticking titles off a ledger. “And that’s not counting the smaller monikers like the Thrasher of the Ash Vale, the River-Walker of Athis, or the Beloved People’s—”

  “I get it,” Yasmin cut in, raising her own hand. “You’d be dust in an archive if you didn’t know who Orland the Everbright was. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Good,” he said brightly. “Then you’ll appreciate the part where he uprooted a mountain to cudgel a Dragon—”

  “What are you trying to tell me, merchant? That you were trained by that Orland?” She snorted, crossing her arms in disbelief. “That’s why you play scholar with monsters and relics?”

  Dain blinked at her.

  “Of course not. How’s he got any time to mentor anyone with all the shit he gets up to?”

  Then he gave her a mock pitying look, making her scowl back at him.

  “Hah,” he chuckled sardonically. “Made you wonder.”

  “If not Orland,” she grumbled, “then what was the point—”

  “Have you ever heard of the Witch?”

  Yasmin was about to say something when she worked the name over in her mouth. After a moment, she closed her mouth. Nothing. She shook her head.

  “Right.” He rested his back against the tree, still wiping slime off his shoulders. “Let’s see… she was at the Saltbridge Stand-Off where one woman held the whole bridge against five merchant companies for three hours. She infiltrated the Bell-Parade in Keln and swapped the Bishop’s reliquary with a brick while the crowd cheered. She slipped into the Stone College’s vault during the Black Exhibit War and walked out with three Altars and a sandwich, and she—”

  “I don’t recognize a single one of those,” Yasmin said flatly.

  Dain’s mouth tilted.

  “... Yeah. Me neither.” He shrugged. “For the record, those are just stories she told me. She may have done those things, or maybe not—I’m taking her word for it.”

  Yasmin blinked once. Then twice, like her brain refused to entertain nonsense, but her ears kept sending them in anyways.

  “But even if there are no records of her in any storybook,” he said more softly, “I know her. I still remember.”

  He tipped his face up.

  The sky above the treetops was a bruised, starless slate. The Copiccia canopy sheened tin-dull in stark contrast, drinking the moonlight instead of reflecting it brightly.

  “Hard to forget someone who falls out of the stars and says she came from another world,” he muttered.

  Yasmin turned to him sharply. “What?”

  He chuckled under his breath. “It was… ten years ago now? Two years after the Black Exhibit War sputtered out.” He scraped muck from his sleeve with his thumb. “Corvalenne had half a street and half a heart left after Auraline’s last starfall barrage wandered off course. We should’ve had parades to celebrate peace, but we had funerals instead. A lot of people didn’t have their homes. A lot of kids didn’t know where to go. But Old Hugo Sorowyn said, ‘Bring them here,’ and Sorowyn Carpentry became a home for all of us orphans of war.

  Yasmin’s mouth softened at the name. “Your… father?”

  “Oh, no. All of us just took his last name,” he said. “You could call him my father, though. I spent more time with him than my real father. In any case, since I was the oldest child in the carpentry, I had to help take care of most of the younger children. Caeli, Rell, and Leo especially. Little knife-fingers. Snored like demons or didn’t sleep at all.”

  He rubbed the heel of his metal palm against his knee, feeling the ghost-ache of a limb he no longer had, and pushed on before the feeling could settle.

  “... One evening, Layla caught a bad cough,” he said. “Old Hugo with the copper bowl said boil spitleaf and fever-root. We were out of both, so I ought to go out into the forest in the middle of the night to fetch them. The moon was thin that night, and the forest denser than it had any right to be… and there she was, lying in a crater.”

  “The Witch from the stars,” Yasmin said slowly, as if repeating the line might make it sound less absurd.

  “She told me a lot of impossible things. That was just the first.” He lifted a shoulder. “I tried to drag her into Corvalenne. She said no town, no people, and no eyes—because she was carrying personal Altars around—so for the next six months, I fetched her what she needed to brew healing potions and reobtain her arsenal of relics that she said she lost. I hid her in a cave and hammered boards into furniture. I learned the good quiets in a forest. And I learned there are quiets that mean something has its eyes on you.”

  Yasmin’s brows knit together. “So those six months while you took care of her… that’s when you fell in love with relics? When you learned all of this?”

  A strange question.

  Dain kept his eyes up, searching the sky for a particular star.

  Dain woke up to cold grass and too much sky.

  He blinked up at a black bowl pricked with paint-thin stars, breath huffing white above his face. For a second, he didn’t know where his back ended and the earth began. The last thing he remembered was… his arms wrapped around the Witch’s fur cloak and the taste of serpent bile still clinging to his teeth.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Now he was lying flat on a hill, not a cave, and his fingers sank into blades of grass so clean and soft it felt like he was holding a brush.

  He sat up immediately and looked around. Corvalenne lay far away, a smear of roofs and chimneys tucked low along the plain, and he immediately realized he was very, very high up. High enough to see the town whole and all the black between it and the forest below the hill.

  The Witch sat cross-legged beside him, hat pitched back, looking up dreamily.

  He was about to ask why they were here when he followed her gaze, and his mouth shut itself.

  For a heartbeat, the world was only the sky and the thousand stars beyond it.

  It was the kind of peace and quiet he felt he could fall through forever.

  “... Cool, right?” the Witch said without looking at him. “I found this hill three nights ago chasing will o’ wisps. Lost an hour. Or a day. Or a year. Hard to tell the time when the stars keep flattering you.”

  He felt a ‘yeah’ run to the tip of his tongue like a quick dog, but he folded his arms and swallowed it back.

  “It’s alright,” he muttered, turning his head like the stars were boring and the grass needed inspecting. He was still angry. He needed to be angry. He needed to keep his hands from shaking.

  “Mm,” she said, amused. “Wanna see something cooler?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  She slid a round thing out from her cloak: a fist-sized orb glassed over with stormlight, golden clouds swirling slowly inside.

  Then she cupped it in both hands, and the orb swelled, cracked, and the golden clouds exploded outwards. The sound made him flinch and close his eyes for a moment, of course, but in the next—as he peeled his eyes open—he was no longer on the hill.

  Sunlight punched down on him, hot and sharp. The wind at his cheek tasted copper. The ground under his palms wasn’t grass, but rather red stone worn to smoothness by thousands of feet.

  He scrambled onto his feet, whirling.

  He was smack dab in the square of a canyon town vast enough to make his neck hurt. Bridges of rope and stone spanning from wall to wall, ladders like threads dropping down to markets stacked on every ledge. Homes and shops spilled out in terraces, their banners flapping crimson and saffron, their rooftops steaming from the heat. Stalls clattered. Donkeys brayed. Dust and spice filled his nose, and the clatter of thousands of voices rose like a tide.

  “What—” he blurted, feet fighting between stepping and backing away. “How—”

  The Witch, still sitting comfortably on the ground beside him as if nothing strange was happening, tilted the orb in her palm and grinned. “Reality Bubble. It’s a decently common relic that records a particular scene in time and space so precisely it traps it. Then, when mana is poured into the bubble, it shatters and plays the trapped scene back as an illusion. This scene is one of my favorites, actually. I bought a few copies of these from someone who was there when this scene happened in reality.”

  He was about to say something else when a beast roar cracked the canyon.

  The crowd around him turned liquid. People ran. He stumbled back as a wave of bodies broke around him. A woman collided with his shoulder and didn’t see him; a boy bolted past his knees; a basket flipped and spilled red fruit without a single apple touching his boot. Dozens, hundreds of bodies rushed past him, weaving around him without so much as a glance, as though he were just… smoke.

  ‘Illusion,’ he reminded himself. He wasn’t really here. He had to tell himself that over and over again, because a part of him had already leaned down to pick up the fruit and ask if anyone was hurt.

  Then the street ahead buckled. A red stone building coughed dust, then burst apart in a hail of timber and plaster.

  Through beams and stone, a giant lion exploded into the town square in front of him.

  Eight meters tall, the giant lion’s mane was no normal fur, but razors of molten gold glinting sharp enough to blind. Four red eyes burned with a terrible intelligence, all fixed on anything that dared move, and those claws—ten on each paw—were each longer than a shortsword and gleaming as though they were forged by the gods themselves.

  It lifted its head and breathed, and the heat lifted around it like mirage.

  Dain knew this was just an illusion—absolutely knew—and he knew nothing here could harm him.

  Even still, as the lion prowled forward—each step sinking talons into stone and left behind glowing gouges—he forgot how to breathe.

  His spine went to iron and his hands to milk.

  But when a groan cut the air to his left, he jerked his head. An old man lay underneath a fallen beam, pinned at the ribs. Blood threaded out of his hair into dust. He lifted his fingers weakly, like he was asking a question to no one.

  The lion turned one set of eyes. Then the other.

  And it took a slow, soft step towards the old man, careful as a cat not to spook its dinner.

  ‘... It’s not real,’ his brain said. This already happened. He was just a ghost here. He couldn’t change anything.

  But as the lion continued stalking towards the old man, he remembered Corvalenne burning—he remembered his parents telling him to run, the sky burning and golden lightning falling from the stars—and his legs said ‘move’.

  He didn’t remember choosing. He was suddenly there, shoving at the beam with both hands, heels grinding. He had no leverage and less weight and the beam didn’t even creak, but he threw his shoulder under the wood anyway, teeth clenched so hard his jaw squealed.

  “Come on,” he hissed. “Come on, come on, come on—”

  The street suddenly went dark around him, so he glanced over his shoulder.

  The lion had blotted the sun with its jaws opened around him.

  He dropped into a crouch, clamping himself over the old man like a shield with his eyes screwed shut, heart thrashing.

  … But death didn’t come.

  He opened one eye.

  A boy—not much older than him—stood in the lion’s jaw, bare feet planted in the stone. His hair was a rough, sun-beaten gold—not the lion’s metal—while his shabby clothes were tears and rope-belt holding on with pure stubbornness. A brass gauntlet swallowed his left hand up to the wrist, and with it, he held the lion’s top jaw, the bottom with his bare right hand.

  The lion wasn’t closing its teeth because the boy wouldn’t let it.

  Dain’s eyes went wide as the boy bared his teeth, snarled, and shoved.

  The lion lurched backwards, claws scraping sparks. The boy didn’t give chase immediately. Instead, he stood, rolled his shoulder, and Dain noticed for the first time the five-pointed star etched onto the back of his gauntlet. One point of the star glowed amber as he snapped his fingers.

  The boy slammed his gauntlet to the ground, and the earth obeyed. Half the street cracked as a giant stone-spear shot up from the ground, almost goring the lion outright, but the beast twisted and the spike only carved fur.

  Another snap of his fingers. Another star point lit up red. The boy thrust his gauntlet forward, and fire sprouted in a wide, blistering cone, painting the lion’s mane in searing flames.

  While the beast roared in pain, golden fur shimmering, the boy snapped his fingers a few more times.

  Blue. Water from the river running through the town cracked up like a whip, lashing the lion’s face and mane. Green. Vines lashed from the nearby trees to hook around its claws and immobilize its limbs. Silver. Metal knives, pots, and shards flew out from every building in the square, needling into the lion’s hide and drawing blood.

  The lion staggered back, only for the boy to be there already, going high, left knee up, left fist down—and then he punched the lion in the nose, laughing all the way.

  "I am Orland, the Fated Hero, and the sun still shines upon me!”